Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton
By Howard Reich and William Gaines
Da Capo, 288 pages, $26
Jelly Roll Morton, the first great jazz composer, was a genius of conflicted longings. Born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe and raised in New Orleans in the 1890s, he was a Creole of color bred on classical music. Emotionally scarred by the desertion of his father, a sometimes trombone player, Morton was disowned as a teenager for fusing his talent into new piano stylizations in the swank bordellos of the Storyville red-light district. There musicians found venues for the hot, pulsing sounds later known as jazz.
In “Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton,” Howard Reich and William Gaines write of Morton’s self-discovery, circa 1900, that it was “[i]n these brothels [that] Morton began to develop a buoyant music marked by syncopated melodies in the right hand, walking bass lines and bouncing chords in the left, a veritable symphony of New Orleans cakewalks and ragtime at his fingertips.”
Jazz arose from many sources, especially religious music. With the authors placing so much emphasis on Storyville, they rather ignore the range of musical idioms that fed into the new art form, jazz. But that is a minor flaw in an otherwise substantial work.
By 1905, when Louis Armstrong was 4, Morton had become a nomadic figure, criss-crossing the country before zeroing in on Chicago. He was a shooting star in the 1920s jazz firmament due to his association with Melrose Brothers Music, a store that sold sheet music and reaped great profits from publishing rights to the songs that Morton (and other black artists) composed.
The systematic theft of Morton’s copyright is a numbing theme in “Jelly’s Blues.” Portions of the book first appeared in a series for the Chicago Tribune by Reich, an arts critic for the paper, and Gaines, an investigative reporter who won two Pulitzer Prizes before he retired from the paper in 2001.
Coming from two journalists with such different backgrounds, the prose voice of “Jelly’s Blues” is surprisingly smooth; the authors balance the articulation of their professional passions. Reich’s descriptive treatment of the music imbues the narrative with lyrical finesse:
” ‘New Orleans Blues’ unfurled themes so intricate that they had to be shared by the two hands. As the piece progressed, the left hand occasionally fired off a series of driving octaves, recalling the tailgate trombone that young Ferd had first heard as a youth, when his father played around the house. . . . Finally, . . . the right hand burst forth with a series of flying octaves that defied any sense of steady meter or pulse. . . .
“Nothing so rhythmically free ever had been heard on a piano.”
Gaines’ reporting provides a moral anchor–the subplot of genius cheated by greedy businessmen–that has rarely been documented in books on jazz or popular music. Musicians’ complaints of being cheated are common; few historians have proved such claims. In 1923, as Morton generated a stream of songs that other musicians began to play, the copyright of “Froggie Moore” was registered by two businessmen brothers named Spikes who soon sold it–unbeknownst to the composer–to Leonard and Walter Melrose in Chicago. “But this was the least of his problems, for Morton did not realize–and could not have anticipated–that the Spikes brothers’ swindle was child’s play compared to the shell game that the Melrose boys had in mind.”
Morton’s record sales enriched the Melrose brothers. Yet by 1938, Morton was scraping for cash, ignored by the musical world he helped create. He found a sympathetic ally in folklorist Alan Lomax, who recorded hours of his reminiscences at a piano in the Library of Congress. Morton was an extravagant personality, given to bragging that he had invented jazz; he had a diamond inlaid in a front tooth from the rough early years when he was a gambler and small-time pimp.
Lomax published a posthumous biography, “Mister Jelly Roll” (1950), that is a classic of jazz literature. “Jelly’s Blues” is every bit as industrious and a more compelling narrative. Lomax was a poetic writer who orchestrated the rhythms of Morton’s spoken words with uncommon skill.
Reich and Gaines take Lomax to task for short-selling the integrity of Morton’s statements about culture, music and his business losses.
Lomax may have been guilty of romanticizing Morton as a chest-beating genius in flight from a broken past; yet if he missed some details, given the materials at hand, Lomax portrayed him with pathos as a truly tragic figure. It would be impossible to write a biography of Morton without great sympathy for what he endured; Reich and Gaines use a wide-angle lens on the melding lines of creation and betrayal. The result is a brilliant morality tale, a meditation on the sacred and profane. The rich musical writing and investigative scrutiny of corrupt business deals play off one another like a vintage jazz polyrhythm.
The recurrent passages on how the Melroses cheated Morton take the history to a new level. Most jazz books build on discography research–how, when, where the records were made–and oral history biographical work pioneered by writers like Lomax, William Russell and Nat Hentoff.
Morton gradually realized that the Melroses were stealing from him. Had he not instigated legal action there would have been no available documentation to reconstruct the damage. In that sense we see Morton demanding not just money, but justice in the greater scheme of time. Morton was indeed up against a shell game; the intensity and intelligence of his letters to the Justice Department late in life draw the reader into a near-operatic saga. Where the jealous composer Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus” schemes to deprive the brilliant young Mozart of his rightful place in musical society, in “Jelly’s Blues” the jazz genius in 1940 is unaware that “the original Melrose Brothers Music Co. did not exist, and its former owner, Walter Melrose, was basking in the sun on his new Arizona horse ranch, living off the spoils of tunes by Morton and other songwriters he had swindled.”
The man who assembled the vital documentation on Morton’s life was Russell, one of the seminal jazz historians, who settled in New Orleans in the 1950s. Russell produced a line of traditional jazz recordings on the American Music label and amassed a collection of discs, interviews and memorabilia. His archive was acquired by the Historic New Orleans Collection after his death. In the late 1990s, when Reich made the first of several research trips for the Tribune series, a wealth of material on Morton–and by Morton, in unpublished sheet music–was there to be tapped. “Jelly’s Blues” is deservedly dedicated to Russell.
In the 1930s, Morton moved to New York; he married and returned to the Catholic Church. In 1940 he made a final, desperate, cross-country trip with all of his records packed in a Lincoln and a ’38 Caddy hitched behind it, hoping for redemption in Los Angeles, where he had done well years before. Retracing the relentless geography of his youth, the authors write:
“Morton was a stranger in these towns, his friends having long since moved away, his name no longer inspiring throngs to see the hot jazz musician from Chicago who carried an outsized roll of cash. . . .
“The only sanctuary Morton found was in the cheap roadside motels he slept in and in the Catholic churches that dotted the landscape. He stopped in some of them to pray for deliverance from his dire situation and for forgiveness for the way he had spent his life–or at least the sinful early parts of it.”
Taken in by Anita Gonzalez, an old girlfriend who had run a bordello in their heyday together, he was writing new music as his heart began to fail. He carved the diamond out of his tooth for Anita to pawn in order to pay for his hospitalization. Anita confected a will making her the beneficiary, and despite having a wife back in New York, Morton signed it. He died July 10, 1941, so discarded by the jazz world that Duke Ellington, who was in Los Angeles at the time, didn’t bother attending his funeral.
“By the year 2000,” the authors report, “Morton’s work had earned more than $1 million in royalties for the composer’s estate and at least twice that much for his publishers–over $3 million in all. After Morton’s death, however, his royalties did not go to his blood relations, who were cut out of the will Anita created.”
